International Business Machines Corporation

Jerald E Leitherer

David B Rolfe

Francis Daniel Lawlor

An architecture uses a process, termed 'encapsulation', by which queues and counters are only accessed through a special memory operand called 'object storage'. The system alone is in control of the object storage, and the user cannot access it directly at any time. If the user needs to access a queue, the user must request it from the system. The system will in turn provide such access by issuing the user a 'token'. This token is the only means of communication between the user and the requested queue. By providing threads to be dispatched to real processors without large operating overhead, through object storage, the operating systems do not need to wait for the system's dispatching process to complete. Operating systems can signal the system through the use of object storage that they are authorized to access the processor when needed and thus forego the long dispatching process. In addition, since real processors are not dedicated, they can execute other programs when not needed. Since the state of threads is unknown to the operating system and the object dispatcher is in charge, operating support is kept at a minimum, which in itself is an important advantage of the invention. The encapsulation process along with the queuing system used in the architecture lead to finer granularity.

Architectural enhancements for parallel computer systems utilizing

The anomaly handling facility provides a system for controlling conversion, detecting anomalies, providing analysis of anomaly content in an array of floating-point elements, and preserving reconstruction data to recover value accuracy typically lost when anomalies are encountered during conversion. Although the preferred embodiment specifically handles anomalies relative to the commonality of value representation by both IBM ESA/370 hexadecimal floating-point notations and ANSI/IEEE 754-1985 binary floating-point stand notations, the systematic design provided by the disclosed floating-point notation conversion anomaly handling facility can be applied to an pair of floating-point notation systems that are not totally coincident in value coverage.

Growing community of inventors

Port Ewen, NY, United States of America

Jerald E Leitherer